“That’s going to be hard to explain,” Audrey said. “I’m not sure I understand all of it myself.”
“Tell me what he told you.”
She sipped some more water, took a breath, and then did her best to recount everything the demon had said — how he had lived as Jeffrey Whitcomb’s son, fooling the surviving members of his family and, apparently, the rest of the world…dooming poor Henry Whitcomb to a miserable life locked up in a sanitarium. How the demon had owned the Colorado house for decades, using it as a sanctuary.
“Whatever that’s supposed to mean,” she added. “I would have thought he could pretty much come and go as he pleased.”
“Maybe,” Michael said. He steepled his fingers together and rested them against the dark gold scruff on his chin, clearly pondering everything she’d just said. “I keep coming back to the part about the portal in the Glendora mansion being his ‘main one.’ That seems to indicate he has them in a number of different places. Did you see anything in the Colorado house?”
“No,” Audrey replied. “But I was still blacked out when he brought me to the house, so I didn’t see anything until I woke up in that bedroom. Even afterward, I went down to the dining room and saw a bit of the foyer and the downstairs hall, but that was it.”
“And you didn’t feel anything?”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t like the Glendora house at all. Almost as soon as I walked in there, I started to get the heebie-jeebies, but I didn’t get that sort of feeling at all in Colorado. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t frightened, but it was the company that frightened me, not the house. Did you feel something there?”
“No.” Michael was silent for a moment, a slight frown pulling at his brows. “That is, I was more focused on finding you than picking up any vibes in the house, but even so, if it had been strong enough, I should have noticed something. And even if I didn’t, Rosemary probably would have, but she didn’t mention feeling anything out of the ordinary.”
In a way, Audrey supposed it was a good thing that the house itself had felt neutral, because she was already overloaded enough dealing with her demon host. So did it mean that there really wasn’t a portal in the Colorado mansion, or that it wasn’t in use and therefore not sending out any bad vibes, or…what?
She really didn’t know. How those things worked was still something of a mystery to her. They connected this world to the world of the demons, but maybe, since the Whitcomb-demon had adopted a human disguise, it was easier for him to get around like a regular human while living and functioning in this world.
“We came in a car,” she said slowly. “If he was using portals to get around, why not have one in this house?”
Michael’s answer seemed to confirm her suspicions. “Because that’s not how they work. They’re not a mode of transportation, but a connection between this world and the dimension where the demons live. I suppose a physicist might say they fold space and time, but in a very particular way. Understand?”
She thought she did, or at least, she thought she could intuit what he was saying as long as she looked at the problem sideways and didn’t try to attack it head-on. “If he has other portals in other places, what would he be using them for?”
“To bring more of his kind here,” Michael said without hesitating. “That’s always been their goal…to subsume as many humans as they can, to increase their influence here. I don’t have any idea how many people might already be affected, but they’re here.”
A shiver trickled its way down her spine. There had been a sort of hard, unflinching conviction in his voice, something that told her he had personal experience with these sorts of possessions. “How do you know?” she asked softly.
He glanced across the aisle to the sole passenger sitting in that row, but the man had his eyes closed and a set of earbuds on, which meant he probably couldn’t hear anything of what they were saying. Still, Michael lowered his voice before answering, “Because of my brother.”
She raised her eyebrows but waited for him to go on.
He hesitated for a moment, then gave a very small lift of his shoulders before sipping from his bottle of water. Finally, he said, “I’d thought he seemed different when he came home from college at Christmas that year, but I couldn’t really put my finger on it. Like…he didn’t laugh when someone told a joke, while at other times I’d catch him with a creepy smile but no real reason for why he’d be smiling in the first place. I didn’t say anything to my parents, mostly because it was just a suspicion that something was wrong. After all, he was just about to finish college. People change when they go away to school.”
Audrey remained silent. She knew what was going to come next — or at least, she knew how this story ended, because she’d lived through its horror as well, only in a very different way.
“We — we had to fly to Hawaii to visit him in jail. My mother was crying during the whole flight.” Michael rubbed his hands on the knees of his dark trousers, a nervous gesture that surprised her a little, just because he usually seemed so controlled. “He hadn’t really spoken since his arrest, although it was clear he’d done it — he hadn’t made any attempt to get away, and they found his fingerprints all over the assault rifle he used. The authorities were hoping he might say something to his family. But he wouldn’t talk to my parents, either. I begged them to let me try — Philip and I had been pretty close when we were younger, although that changed after he went to college. Finally, they gave in. I went and looked at him through the glass, and said one word: ‘Why?’”
“Did he answer?”
She could see the way the muscles tightened in Michael’s jaw. “Not at first. He just stared at me, and even though I really hadn’t had any experiences with demons before then, I could tell there was something terribly wrong with him. That wasn’t my brother staring back at me…that was something else. Something inhuman was living behind those eyes.”
It would have been easy for her to give him a pat explanation, to say that mental illness often manifested in ways that were highly disturbing to those close to the person in question. However, Audrey didn’t bother, because she’d learned over the past week that sometimes there were no rational explanations for the horrors in people’s lives, that sometimes you had to understand that the universe worked through the inexplicable, the paranormal.
“You think he was possessed?” she asked, the words barely a murmur.
“I know he was.” Michael wasn’t looking at her, but at the screen set into the seat back in front of him. It was blank, because of course he hadn’t ordered an in-flight movie, and yet he seemed fascinated by its flat gray surface. “No human being could have looked at me like that. And then he began to laugh. He said, ‘Less room for you. More room for us,’ and kept laughing and laughing. They finally took me out of the visitation room and hauled him back to his cell. And that was where they found him dead, three days later.”
“No mark on him, no obvious cause of death.” Audrey remembered that part of the story very well; more than once in the intervening ten years, she’d pondered that mystery, wondering how it was that a young, healthy man of twenty-two could simply drop dead like that. “What are you trying to tell me, Michael?”
One corner of his mouth twisted, and he turned in his seat so he could face her. “I’m saying the demons used him to kill those people. Once the deed was done, they had no further use for him. What else could he have meant when he said, ‘More room for us’? There are beings who want this world, want to take it from us.”
His gray eyes latched on hers.
“We have to make sure we can stop them.”
Chapter 9
Tucson was blessedly warm and sunny, and Audrey could feel her spirits lift as they left the terminal and headed out to the place where Michael had left his rented SUV in the long-term parking lot. His words on the plane haunted her, but she tried to tell herself the situation wasn’t quite as bad as he made things seem. Obviously, the demon inhabiting Jeffrey Whitco
mb’s body wasn’t omnipotent, or the world would have been overrun with possessed people by now. It took work to get those spirits to this plane, and they’d dealt him a serious blow by destroying one of his main means to do so.
For now, it was enough for the three of them to go to a restaurant not too far from the airport, where they sat down and had enormous Southwest breakfasts, even though it was now almost one-thirty. Michael invited Rosemary to stay longer — “your instincts could really help us on the show” — but she demurred.
“I think you’ll do fine with Audrey,” she said after taking a large bite of her chilaquiles. “Her powers are growing by leaps and bounds. I’m not really the TV type.”
“Neither am I,” Audrey protested. “I just sort of fell into it.”
“Okay, but really, I’m not interested. I need to get back home, get back to work there. Besides,” Rosemary added, looking thoughtful, “I can keep an eye on the Glendora mansion for you, let you know if anything starts rearing its ugly head again.”
“God, I hope not.” The last thing Audrey wanted to hear was that their work at the Whitcomb mansion in Southern California wasn’t yet done. She’d be happy if she never saw the inside of that place again.
“It’s not likely,” Michael said, but then added, quashing her hopes, “but it’s not impossible, either. It’ll help to have someone on the ground there, just in case Whitcomb decides to go back and try to reconstruct the portal we destroyed.”
“He’s not really Whitcomb,” Audrey pointed out, but Michael only shrugged.
“Shorthand. We don’t know his demon name, so it’s just easier to call him that. I know someone in L.A. who’s really good at sifting through old records. I think once we get back to the B&B — and before Colin pounces and expects us to start shooting — I’m going to drop my friend Fred Peñasco a quick email and see if he can start digging, find any other properties our demon friend has purchased. If anyone can locate that information, it’s Fred.”
“Do you think those properties are where Whitcomb’s set up his other portals?” Rosemary asked, pausing with a forkful of chilaquiles halfway to her mouth.
“Probably,” Michael replied. He fiddled with the straw in his glass of iced tea, obviously thinking over her question. “I mean, it just makes more sense to own the properties where you’re conducting that kind of magic, because then you don’t have to worry so much about anyone interfering. The Glendora mansion is an outlier…maybe he felt attached to it because it was the place where he opened his first portal. I can’t say for sure.”
And solidified his hold on the man he’d possessed, if the demon’s comments to her were to be believed. Audrey had always heard that it was a spectacularly bad idea to dabble in that kind of magic, and Jeffrey Whitcomb’s fate served as an object lesson as to exactly why that sort of thing could go horribly wrong. Had Michael’s brother done the same thing? Was that why a demon had invaded his consciousness, made him commit such a heinous act of violence?
She really didn’t know. Because obviously, not all demons committed mayhem the second they had possession of a human’s body, or Whitcomb would have gone on his own killing spree.
Or maybe he had. Maybe he’d just never gotten caught.
The restaurant was warm, almost stuffy, and yet she still felt cold. She couldn’t help wondering how she’d managed to survive, the demon’s comments about not killing people notwithstanding. Obviously, the demon who’d possessed Michael’s brother didn’t have the same scruples.
His hand touched hers under the table, and Audrey startled. “Sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around all this.”
“You and me both,” Rosemary said with a strained sort of chuckle. “Because if the demon inside Whitcomb has managed to walk around and mingle with normal humans for this many years, it makes me wonder how many others like him are out there.”
“Probably not too many,” Michael remarked. “He’s a rarity.”
Audrey raised an eyebrow at him. “What do you mean?”
He shot a quick glance at the booth next to theirs, but the people there were in the process of getting up and leaving, and didn’t seem to be paying any attention to them. “There are hierarchies of demons, just like there are hierarchies of angels. The lowest form of demon — the most numerous — doesn’t have a lot of native intelligence. They’re mostly good at causing mayhem. The farther you go up the rungs, so to speak, the more sophisticated the demons become. There aren’t as many of them, though. So I don’t think we have to worry too much about there being armies of possessed human beings, biding their time until they can take over. That doesn’t mean Whitcomb isn’t extremely dangerous.”
Not exactly what Audrey wanted to hear, but she’d already known that about him. “Dangerous how, exactly?”
“He can let in lesser demons, like the ones we battled in the basement of the Glendora house. They can cause a lot of damage.”
“But why?” Rosemary asked. She’d set down her fork and didn’t look as though she intended to pick it up again. “I mean, what’s the point?”
He gave her a weary smile. Something about the expression made Audrey want to take his hand and tell him everything was going to be all right, although the smile hadn’t even been directed at her. “Don’t bother to ascribe human motivations to the beings we’re dealing with. They delight in destruction for its own sake. Remember, this world was made by God, and if they can do anything that wreaks havoc on His creation, they’re all for it.”
Rosemary’s mouth twisted. “I don’t believe in God.”
Audrey wasn’t all that surprised by the psychic’s revelation — she seemed to be fairly nonreligious — but she was a little startled that Rosemary would state her position so boldly. However, Michael didn’t seem fazed.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “And when I say God, I really mean the Creator, the motivating force in the universe, not some white-bearded representative of the patriarchy.”
His comment made Rosemary grin. “Ah, okay. Well, then, we’re probably a little closer in spirit than I imagined. And I guess I can see why the demons would want to disrupt that.”
“Exactly. Their whole reason for being is chaos. Which is why we need to make sure to keep a close eye on Whitcomb and what he’s doing with them.”
All while shooting a television show. Audrey wished they could go back to the B&B and tell Colin Project Demon Hunters was on hold indefinitely, but she knew that wasn’t how these things worked. They had a schedule they had to stick to, or risk having the show canceled…which was exactly what Whitcomb wanted. Besides, right now they didn’t even know where to look for him. Locating the demon was going to take time…and a lot of digging. She’d just have to suffer through these next episodes, no matter what happened.
On the upside, after being held captive by the Whitcomb-demon, she figured it was going to take a lot more to scare her going forward.
“If we can even figure out where he — it — is,” she said.
Michael gave a resigned lift of his shoulders. “Which is why I want to get in touch with Fred. He can work on that angle in the background while we’re filming.”
“While you’re filming,” Rosemary replied. “I checked, and there’s a Southwest flight from Tucson to Ontario this afternoon at 4:45. I was hoping one of you would give me a ride, since I still need to go back to the bed-and-breakfast and pack up my stuff.”
“Not a problem,” Michael said. “That is, Colin might make it a problem, since it’ll cut into our shooting time, but I’ll make sure we get you to your flight.”
She didn’t quite smile, but she did look relieved, as though she was worried that he might try again to convince her to stay in Tucson and help with the shoot. “Thanks.”
After that, they finished what was left of their meals, then paid the tab and left. Once they were inside Michael’s rental and headed back to the B&B, Audrey asked, “What’re you going to tell Colin?”
Michael looked vaguely surprised by the question. “The truth, of course. He won’t like it — he may not even want to believe it — but I’m sure as hell not going to let him blame you for losing a day’s worth of work when none of this is remotely your fault.”
She supposed she should have expected him to reply in such a way, but she could still feel some of the tension begin to leave her neck. No, none of this was her fault, but Colin seemed to be the kind of person to sling blame, if for no other reason than to make himself feel better. No doubt the tactic had worked for him in the past, or he wouldn’t still be doing it. However, she felt better knowing that Michael would be there to deflect if necessary.
As she watched the streets of Tucson pass by, bright and clear and sharp under a blazing sun, it was hard to remember that she’d been trapped, cold and hungry, in a snowbound mansion only two states away from here. It felt like another world, one she had no desire to visit ever again.
When they pulled into the parking lot of the Thunderbird bed-and-breakfast, Audrey had a difficult time believing this place could possibly be haunted, let alone infested by demons. It was a cheerful mishmash of colonial pueblo architecture and Victorian accents, and was surrounded by lovely grounds, lush and green even now, in late February.
“This place is haunted?” she asked, looking around her as she clutched a little bag of necessities they’d bought at a Walgreens on the way over. Her clothes were gone, but at least now she had toiletries, makeup, and a package of new underwear to get her through the next few days. Michael had suggested that she borrow the clothing she needed from the wardrobe that had been brought for the shoot, and she’d gone along with the plan. Right then, she was just too tired to worry about doing any real shopping.
“Oh, yes,” Michael said. Neither he nor Audrey had taken any luggage along with them on their rescue mission, so there was no need to get anything out of the trunk. He pushed the Grand Cherokee’s remote to lock the vehicle, then gestured toward a path that led away from the tiny five-space parking lot. “Come on — let’s see if you can pick up on anything.”
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